Part of what buries you is not the volume of content at all. It is a quiet shame — the sense that you should already know this, that a person your age, with your background, ought not to be starting at the beginning.
So you over-gather, hoping to skip the beginner's stage entirely, to arrive somewhere advanced without having passed through the door. But there is no such road. There is only the door, and the shame standing in front of it.
The Beginner Is Not a Lesser Thing
The tradition does not despise the beginner. It honors the one who asks, even the simplest question, and it warns the proud far more than the unlearned. The Rambam, vast as his knowledge was, wrote to make foundations available to those who had none — an act that assumes beginners are worth meeting where they are.
Pirkei Avot teaches that the bashful person does not learn — and there is mercy in that, not rebuke. It means the path requires you to risk looking like what you are: someone near the start. The shame you carry is the very thing the tradition asks you to set down.
To be a beginner is not to be behind. It is to be in the only place from which anyone has ever begun.
Let the Shame Go First
So before you choose a source or shape a question, do something quieter. Give yourself permission to not know. The overwhelm loosens the moment you stop demanding that you already be elsewhere.
From that lighter place, the next steps become possible. You can ask plainly. You can start small. You can walk up to a teacher and say, honestly, I am beginning — which is the truest and most welcome thing a seeker can say.
Bring that honesty to a living teacher. They have met many beginners and despised none of them. The door has always been open; it was only the shame that made it look closed.